


If This Is To End In Fire

by Jiksa



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Rimming, Rough Sex, Spit As Lube, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-03 21:12:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12756294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jiksa/pseuds/Jiksa
Summary: Apocalypsemakes it sound a lot more glamorous than it actually is.





	If This Is To End In Fire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wearetheluckyones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearetheluckyones/gifts).



> Written for the [2017 Tomlinshaw Fic Exchange](https://tomlinshawexchange2017.tumblr.com/). Thanks to the lovelies who sensechecked and betaed. <333
> 
>  **wearetheluckyones** \- thank you so much for your AMAZING prompts. I've never had any interest in writing apocalypse!fic before, but I had an absolute field day writing this. I really, really hope it works for you  <3
> 
>  **Content warnings:** Not particularly graphic or gory, but references made to the usual trappings of a zombie apocalypse: interpersonal violence, body horror, minor character death, existential despair, brain-eating walkers lurking in the background. Inspired by the _Walking Dead_ universe, so references to "walkers," instead of zombies.

_Apocalypse_ makes it sound a lot more glamorous than it actually is, but there’s not really any other word for it. There was a world, and now there isn’t. There were cities and people and life, and now there’s… this.

Louis’s taken to it like a duck to water. It’s almost like he’s been waiting for the world to end to unleash his inner brute, the ego and bluster and volatility Nick’s always dismissed as youthful arrogance quickly escalating into actual savagery. He’s fast, fierce, calculating, fearless. He doesn’t take anyone’s shit, doesn’t give armed strangers the benefit of the doubt, doesn’t let anything get in the way of their survival.

He’s still a fucking arsehole, as far as Nick’s concerned, but at least he keeps them alive. Not that Nick would ever tell Louis how grateful he is for that, not that Louis would ever let him.

There’s a lot the two of them don’t talk about. It’s easier that way.

In contrast, Nick’s responded to it all the only way he knows how: with overwhelming anxiety and intense, neurotic focus. He frets and plans and tries to make sense of things, stockpiles and counts and budgets, tries to think ahead and to prepare them for whatever threat’s coming next. At any given time, he knows exactly what they’ve got stockpiled and how long it’ll take to run out, how vulnerable they are at any moment to everything begging to kill them.

Harry doesn’t say much anymore, hasn’t really been himself since they lost Gemma. He still does his work, forages and keeps guard and eats whatever Nick puts in a bowl for him, but it’s like the lights have gone out of his eyes. Harry’s always loved harder than anyone Nick’s ever known; Nick can’t help but think he’s buried parts of himself with every person they’ve put in the ground over the last year. 

Harry’s silence is deafening, but neither Nick, nor Louis, know how to fill it, and there’s no one else left to try.

“We’re running low on supplies,” Nick says soberly, five days after he started thinking _shit, fuck, we’re going to run out again, we’re going to actually die this time._ He runs his finger around the edge of his bowl, cleaning every last smudge of tomato sauce off of the porcelain. Louis ate his dinner in three spoonfuls; Harry’s barely touched his. “We need to do another big run.”

Louis bristles, his eyes cutting immediately to Nick’s. “How low?”

“We could stretch our food to eight days,” Nick says. “Maybe ten, but it would hurt. We’re already out of water purification tablets. We’re running _low._ ”

Louis sighs. “Map. Come on.”

Nick pushes the coffee table aside and pulls the big folding map of London out from where it’s been carefully tucked under the sofa. The paper’s gone all waxy and soft from being handled over the last year. “Maybe we could try going East again, there might be some—”

“Impossible,” Louis says, surveying the city laid out before them. “Don’t have enough ammunition to trade for safe passage through the Holloway trenches. They’d actually have our heads this time.”

“The settlement in Wembley—”

“Wiped out two weeks ago,” Louis mutters. He glances at Harry, who’s ducked his head darkly. “The whole place is overrun with walkers. Don’t know what happened, but it looks like it got violent.”

Louis predictably rolls his eyes when Nick flinches. “We didn’t tell you because we knew you’d react like that. There was nothing left when we tried to forage, everything was already dust.”

Nick turns to Harry. That settlement’s only a two hour walk from their own hideout; trading with them has saved their asses more than once. “ _That’s_ what those fires were that night?”

Louis hisses, “What, mate, you thought it was a fucking bonfire?”

Harry drops his spoon; the clatter of it loud in the hollow silence. “Lou. Please.”

“We could go South again,” Nick tries desperately. That settlement was only two hours away; if someone torched it, they might be coming this way next. “Past the— by the—”

“We’re not going South,” Harry says sternly. “Not after last time.”

 _Last time_ is as inadequate descriptor of what happened as anything, but neither of them is ever going to call it anything else. Primrose Hill is still an undetonated minefield, a wasteland of walkers bumping into mines like drunk sharks into coral reef. There’s still food and medicine there, buildings that haven’t yet been looted, but it’s a suicide mission. Sometimes Nick hears the echoes of mines going off in the middle of the night; the resulting car alarms keeping him awake until the batteries eventually die off.

At least the noise draws the walkers away from where they are, for a little while.

“That doesn’t really leave us a lot of options,” Nick says needlessly. The map’s almost entirely covered, most of the areas around them blacked out with pen markings. What’s left of London has either been looted, claimed by hostile gangs, or is crawling with walkers. They’ve gotten lucky up here in Hampstead, Harry’s little house tucked away behind a sky-high wall, with reinforced windows and black-out curtains. Luck doesn’t last in this world, though, they all know that.

“We need to get the fuck out of London,” Louis says, not for the first time. “We need to gather whatever shit we can carry and head North, get out of the city before whoever’s left realises exactly where we are.”

“Harry won’t leave,” Nick argues. Harry’s wrapped his arms around his knees, his shoulders hunched up to his ears. He won’t cry, Nick knows that, but it doesn’t stop Nick from wanting to console him. “We’ve already talked about this.”

It’s with unsurprising, but still jarring, softness that Louis says, “Harry’s got no choice if he wants to live.”

Louis’s still a fucking arsehole, has been since the moment they all holed up at Harry’s to _wait out the craziness_ when this all started. After reports of a _global outbreak of an unidentified virus_ had emerged, before the power grid failed and the army firebombed the fuck out of the city to contain the infection, Harry had invited as many people as he could fit into his little house in Hampstead. “Slumber party,” he’d announced, as though the world wasn’t already spiralling wildly around them. He’d laughed when he’d shown them the food he’d hastily stockpiled in his basement, as though this was all still a joke they would soon learn the punch line to.

That first night in the house, Louis snatched a bottle of rum out of Nick’s hands as they sat on the floor in front of the TV, Pixie’s hands in Nick’s hair and Lottie asleep beside her brother. The flustered news anchor had used words like _rapidly spreading viral infection_ and _quarantine areas being compromised at an alarming rate_ and _panic on an international level_. Nick snatched the bottle back with an irritated huff, and Louis socked him in the shoulder for his trouble. 

He’s been a fucking arsehole to Nick since day one of this mess, and yet, Nick’s never seen him be anything but kind to Harry. It’s his one redeeming quality in all this, that and his stubborn unwillingness to let any more of them die after he and Harry both buried their sisters.

It’s been just the three of them for months now, everyone else dead or gone to try their luck somewhere else.

Gill and Pixie both went West a while back, Aimee’s just gone altogether. It was just one slip-up, one quick graze of teeth as Nick helped her fight off a walker in the little off-license they’d broken into. She’d insisted she was fine; they’d washed the wound with vodka and wrapped it tight with a makeshift bandage torn from Nick’s T-shirt. By the time they’d walked back to Harry’s, though, Nick had an arm tight around Aimee’s waist and the festering wound had bled through the bandages. She’d been dead before dawn, and then Louis drove a knife through her skull the moment her body began stirring again.

He and Louis don’t talk about that, either. It had to be done, and Louis did it. Simple as that.

They buried her in the garden, next to more friends Nick thought he’d ever lose. They don’t bring bodies back anymore: they left Niall where he collapsed in Camden, they buried Lottie and Gemma where they got blown up in Primrose Hill. James was the first of them to go, to trip and fall to the ground as they ran from a horde of walkers. None of them could bear to look back, but they all heard the moment he went quiet, and then they ran until their lungs ached.

“Harry,” Louis says again, with that same, gentle voice that seems so incongruous with all his sharp edges. “It’s time to go.”

Harry sighs. He rubs his eyes, somehow looking more bone-weary than Nick would ever have expected. “Yeah, I know,” he says finally. “Should be enough petrol in the bikes to get to Birmingham.”

Nick scoffs. “What, on the M1? Are you mental?”

“Back roads,” Louis says without looking up, studying the roads leading out of Hampstead and up North. Nick watches him trace potential trajectories with an ease that tells Nick it’s not the first time he’s tried to find them a way out of here. “Off-road, if we have to. Stop for supplies, water, sleep, whatever we need along the way.”

“There are abandoned cars clogging up every road in and out of London, walkers everywhere out there, and those bikes are noisy as hell. That’s insane.”

“That’s the best plan we’ve fucking got, Nick, have you got a better one? Cower here like sitting ducks, until we run out of food or someone finally finds us?”

“Lou,” Harry warns again. “He’s just trying to be pragmatic.”

“He’s trying to be a fucking wanker, more like.” Louis points down at the map. “These _things_ are attracted to noise and lights and movement, yeah? This city’s full of car alarms and explosions and survivors killing each other to stay alive. If we can just get somewhere quieter, to a little house in the country somewhere, maybe we’ve got a fighting chance.”

“Lou—”

“No, I’m sick of this _waiting around to die_ bullshit. We should’ve gone North ages ago, properly looked for our families and settled down somewhere out of the way. If we hadn’t insisted on staying in this godforsaken, bombed-out, walker-infested, hipstery hellhole, maybe we wouldn’t have lost—”

Harry visibly flinches at the reminder, but Louis barely hesitates for a moment before barrelling on.

“—I mean, what’ve we even got left to lose at this point? Our lives? It’s not like they’re worth much anymore, all we do is sit around grieving and obsessively counting soup cans and wasting away like we’ve already fucking given up.”

The bowl breaks with a sharp _crash_ , the pieces flying apart and tomato sauce spreading on the white wall like fresh blood. “We’re leaving,” Harry breathes into the deafening silence that follows. He looks like he’s shaking all over; Nick’s relieved to see he’s not the only one. “Okay? We’re fucking leaving.”

“Haz,” Louis says immediately, chastened, as Harry gets off the floor. His face crumples. “Harry, come— I didn’t. _Harry_.”

The door slams behind Harry, and Nick grabs Louis’s arm before he can go after him. Harry’s grief is so big— smothering and punishing and twisting Harry up until Nick can’t make out the proper shape of him anymore. “Give him space.”

Louis turns, meeting Nick’s eyes for a long, hard moment, like he’s looking at a bug he wants to squash or a boy he desperately wants to kiss again. Nick can never fucking make sense of him. His nostrils flare suddenly, before he tears carelessly out of Nick’s grip. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

Of all the things he and Louis don’t talk about, this is the most important one.

Nick nods slowly, taking a step back. “Didn’t mean to… you know. Just, Harry. Give him some space.”

“You can fuck right off, thanks.”

“Sure,” Nick sighs. “I’ll be downstairs, obsessively counting soup cans or whatever the fuck you just said.”

Louis roughly shoulders his rifle with a shake of his head, then ducks back outside to patrol the perimeter. Nick considers cleaning the sauce off the wall, but he doesn’t have the stomach for it. It looks too much like blood. They’ll be gone soon, anyway.

 

—

 

Nick meticulously counts what they’ve got left, subtracting what they ate tonight from the inventory he’s got itemised in a ruled notebook. He studies their near-empty shelves by candlelight, trying to work out what they’ll take with them when they go. 

There are only two motorcycles between the three of them, and they won’t be able to carry much if they want their fuel to last. Full packs would make them bulky and vulnerable to walkers, but empty packs would make them vulnerable to much worse. Nick can’t think about that.

He fingers what’s left of their antibiotics and ammunition. It’s not much, but it might be enough to get out of London in one piece. It makes his stomach turn, the thought of going back out there again, of leaving their little nest for uncharted territory.

He hears Louis in the doorway before Louis even clears his throat. He probably shouldn’t be surprised, but he always is. “What do you want?”

“Take a guess.”

Nick turns to see Louis leaning against the side of the doorway, a bottle of grog in one hand and that carefully neutral look on his face. He’s still in camo pants and a worn T-shirt, a knife tucked into the side of one worn leather boot. He takes a swig of drink and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, muttering, “If you’re done counting soup.”

Louis won’t apologize for earlier; Nick knows that. He wouldn’t want him to. It’s easier like this, anyway, guilty and hard and rough and fast, always behind Harry’s back. It’s easier to pretend it doesn’t mean anything.

Nick wraps his arms across his chest. “Harry’s asleep, then?”

“Harry’s fine. He knows we need to leave.”

“You’ve been drinking,” Nick points out. “Consent issues.”

Louis rolls his eyes as he closes the distance between them. “I’ve had one sip,” he clarifies, handing the bottle over. “And you don’t have issues with my ability to consent, you have issues full stop.”

Nick takes a sniff of it— rum, could be worse —before swallowing a mouthful. He coughs when it burns on the way down, heat spreading across his chest. “Such a sweet talker, Lou.”

Louis’s hands are already on Nick’s waist, his breath damp against Nick’s ear, his facial hair rough against Nick’s jaw. Nick’s traitorous knees already feel weak, his grip almost failing on the bottle between his fingers. “Not here to talk.”

Nick is well aware; these stolen moments are for quick touches and quicker kisses, for biting down on anything that might complicate things. It’s the only time Nick ever manages to forget where they are anymore, what they’ve lost, how much it all aches. It’s the only time he manages to sleep through the night, after Louis’s taken him apart and forced him back together again.

Not that he’d ever tell Louis; not that Louis would ever let him.

He closes his eyes, letting Louis press rough kisses to his neck and jaw, letting Louis slide a knee between his legs and press him bodily back against the shelf. “Lou,” he breathes, before he can help himself. He slides the bottle onto one of the empty shelves and nuzzles Louis’s ear. “We’re out of vaseline.”

Louis pulls back immediately, a deep furrow in his brow. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” 

Nick wants to palm his cheek and press their mouths together slowly like some sort of fucking romance novel. “I told you,” he whispers guiltily, keeping his hands firmly to himself. “We’ve been running _low_. We used the last of it to grease the hinges on the back fence last week.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Louis hisses, slamming his palm against the wall behind them in sudden, reckless frustration. The shock of it startles Nick, clenching up his insides the way all noises seem to do now. He closes his eyes, ducking his head to hide against Louis’s neck. Louis lets him, bringing a hand up to hold the back of Nick’s head. His fingers twitch, just once, almost like a caress. “Wanted to fuck you.”

Heat catches in Nick like wildfire. It makes him feel a little mad, how badly he wants it, too. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” Louis sighs, glancing to Nick’s side to review what’s left on their shelves. There’s nothing, Nick knows, but he lets Louis look anyway. “You clean?”

“Clean.” Nick frowns. “I washed up before dinner.”

“ _Clean_ ,” Louis repeats, meeting his eyes with a strange look. He draws his bottom lip in between his teeth and glances down between them. “You know what I mean. It rained all night.”

“Oh.” Nick flushes. This, of all things, shouldn’t make him feel so horribly exposed, considering every ugly, vulnerable, broken part they’ve had to reveal of themselves over the last year. “Soap and water, before dinner.”

All three of took buckets of water from the garden into the shower this afternoon, treating themselves to long, careful scrub-downs, as though any amount of soap and water could wash any of this away. Nick had already spent all morning washing mud and blood and sweat out of their clothes, the water turning a dark, dull brown on its way down the drain.

Louis releases his bottom lip and runs his tongue over it, still looking down between them. “Can you handle just spit?”

Nick immediately thinks, _yes_ and _please_ before he’s even given it proper consideration. “If you go slow,” he says hesitantly. Slow isn’t really in their repertoire, quick and hard and shameful more their speed. Nick wants it with every fibre of his being, Louis flush against him, taking his time, taking it slow like it’s actually special between them. “Really slow.”

“Slow,” Louis repeats, looking between Nick’s eyes like he’s trying to make sense of something. Nick wants to fucking kiss him, to lie down with him in a bed, to be fucked slow and good and deep like he isn’t just Louis’s last resort. “Nothing like an apocalypse to inspire a bit of romance.”

“You know what they say,” Nick murmurs, his heart slamming in his chest. “If there’s no romance at the apocalypse, I’m not coming.”

Louis smirks like he doesn’t get the reference, or like he thinks Nick’s being a shit. It sends another spark of heat through Nick. So does the way Louis grabs him, the way he turns him around to face the wall, the way he reaches around to undo Nick’s trousers and push his jeans down. “Don’t worry,” he hisses against Nick’s ear, fisting a hand in Nick’s hair. His belt buckle feels cold against Nick's arse. “I’ll make you come.”

And then Louis’s kisses are trailing down Nick’s spine, until he’s on his knees and spreading Nick apart. His breath is warm against Nick’s crack, his fingers gentle as they dip between his arse cheeks, and then he leans in to run his wet tongue over Nick’s hole, and Nick _groans_ , shameless and loud and shocked.

Louis’s never done this with him, never even come close. Nick doesn’t even know if he would’ve let him if it wasn’t their last resort. But now that they’re here, Louis’s hands holding Nick open and his tongue buried in Nick’s arse, it’s the closest thing to heaven Nick’s experienced in ages.

Louis isn’t gentle, or careful, or shy — he eats Nick’s arse like he’s been starving for it, like it gets him hot, too, like he’s actually getting off on doing it. He gets Nick sopping wet and loose and aching, balancing on a knife's edge within mere minutes. He squeezes his eyes shut, desperately holding on, trying not to beg for it.

He crumples shamelessly against the wall when Louis’s tongue breaches him, moaning brokenly into his fist and pushing his arse out, reaching back to dig his fingers in Louis’s hair and pull him closer. “Louis,” he breathes, already out of his head with it. “Lou, come— come _on_.”

“Shh,” Louis admonishes, running gentle fingers between Nick’s thighs and cupping his balls. He presses a slow, wet kiss to Nick's arse cheek. Nick’s desperately, desperately hard. “I’ll take care of you.”

And the strange, horrible, confusing thing is, he actually does.

 

—

 

After, as they’re pulling their clothes back on, as Nick’s all shaky and soft and quiet and sated, a little emotionally shell-shocked from it all, Louis murmurs, “Ride with me when we go.”

Nick frowns, his hands pausing on his belt buckle. He can’t bring himself to look at Louis, can’t bring himself to confront the reality of what they just did, of how slow and careful and gentle Louis was with him. He can still feel Louis deep inside himself, everything in him sore and aching from every place Louis’s been. “I can ride with Harry.”

“Nah,” Louis mutters, picking the bottle back off of the shelf and taking a long swallow. Out of the corner of his eye, Nick can tell Louis’s cheeks are flushed the most beautiful shade of pink. He’s still got Louis’s come inside him, bruises from Louis’s mouth blooming all over his shoulder blades, his mouth still aching from the one, heartbreaking time Louis kissed him tonight. “I’m a better rider than him; you’re with me.”

Nick swallows thickly, nodding. He wants to tell him how fucking terrified he is, but he won't. “If you want.”

Louis stands there for a strange, long moment, like he's about to say something else. To Nick's relief, he puts the bottle back down and leaves without another word. It’s for the best.

 

—

 

Nick sleeps unusually late the next morning, curled up in his blankets in the corner of what used to be his and Aimee’s room. They don’t let sunlight into the house anymore, the windows all taped up with black garbage bags and gaffa tape and black-out curtains, wooden boards nailed up as an extra safety precaution. It means they can light candles without potential passers-by (dead or alive) catching a flicker of light from the house. It means it’s always dark inside, the days bleeding into each other without beginnings or ends.

Nick still keeps a battery-operated clock on the nightstand. It’s utterly meaningless— none of them have anywhere to be ever again —but it comforts him all the same.

Birmingham or up North seem impossibly far, the space between this little house and wherever they’re going full of danger and walkers and other survivors with bigger weapons than the three of them.

He can’t trust that they’ll make it. He wonders if that’s why Louis was so careful with him.

He crawls out of bed once he hears the clatter of cutlery against porcelain, murmured conversation and bodies moving in the kitchen. “You’re up late,” Harry says, from where he’s perched on the kitchen counter. Louis’s spreading peanut butter onto biscuits and opening cans of pineapple rings, his back turned to Nick. He’s wearing what he always wears; full apocalypse gear even when they’re inside. “Sleep well?”

“Not bad,” Nick mutters, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He tries not to look at Louis; everything inside him still feels horribly sore. “You?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Harry says. His hands are smudged with traces of black oil, his hair tied back, a knife tucked into his boot and a gun strapped to his belt. He catches Nick’s eye over the rim of his mug. “Serviced the bikes, they’re ready when we are.”

Nick doesn’t think he’ll ever be ready, doesn’t think there’s any way to stop being terrified of everything. His whole world has narrowed down to this little house and the inventory of things they need to survive, and all of their friends buried in the garden. He doesn’t trust they’ll survive whatever’s out there. “Today?”

Harry shrugs. “No point in waiting around. We need to move on, right?”

Nick nods slowly. Harry still looks exhausted, his eyes swollen like he’s been crying, but something about him seems different. The sauce stain from last night has been cleaned off the wall. He looks the slightest bit more like himself.

Louis puts plates down on the dining table and motions for them both to sit. There’s a candle burning, the map of London open, two sets of motorcycle keys next to a third hand gun and two small knives. “Eat something,” Louis orders. “We’ll eat better when we find our first shelter. Pancakes, maybe, if we can make a fire and find what we need.”

“Pancakes,” Nick repeats nonsensically, sinking gingerly into a seat. “Nothing like pancakes to brighten up an apocalypse.”

“Always said,” Louis murmurs, pouring Nick a cup of tea. He’s not looking at Nick, either. It makes Nick’s stomach hurt, thinking what they did the night before and how it might have ruined everything. He still feels rubbed raw from having Louis inside him, from how deeply Louis kissed him after. “If there’s no pancakes at the apocalypse, I’m not coming.”

Harry slides into the seat across from him, rolling his eyes as he takes a big bite of a biscuit. “You’ve literally never said that.”

Louis leans back in his seat. Nick can hear a strange smile in his voice when he says, “Looks like it’s a brand new day then, gentlemen.”

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr post](http://jiksax.tumblr.com/post/167910745799/fic-if-this-is-to-end-in-fire)
> 
> Title from ["I See Fire" by Ed Sheeran.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mllXxyHTzfg)


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